


Key

by FyrMaiden



Series: 2013 Klaine Advent [8]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 19:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4405397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Kurt's mind is a palace built of memories, and sometimes he disappears inside of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Key

**Author's Note:**

> _Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn’t know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book._  
>  Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, 1993

Kurt keeps himself locked up, or locked down, or locked away. The measure of his life has been loss: his mother, his safety, his dreams, his father (almost), his brother. He considers himself to have a relationship with loss, with death, that most teenagers don’t have. He creates colour codes for his emotions so he doesn’t have to talk about them. He doesn’t think people know how to read them, but he feels like he’s communicating when he wears blue or red or sombre black.

Blaine knows how to read the code. He doesn’t know the exact language, but Blaine understands that there is a message in the accessories. He understands how much Kurt felt stifled and silenced by the rigidity of uniform, by the unwavering sameness of rows of red piping and grey slacks. Kurt hadn’t thought it was so obvious, had tried his hardest to assimilate, but then, Blaine had really noticed him the first time he wore his own clothes to spy on them and then not seen him again until he sang for a dead canary. It shouldn’t have been the shock it was that Blaine would understand.

Kurt keeps a map in his mind. On it, he scrawls important dates. He draws it in pictures. A pink carnation sits neatly beside a prom queen crown. His airplane pin beside red highwater pants. A thousand thousand bow ties, knotted and unknotted. A perfume bottle hanging from progressively higher branches of a Christmas tree. The bottom of the old dresser in his parents’ bedroom. A bright red shower curtain. The tapered vivid angles of a body low lit by want and love and his side lamp because the overhead felt cold. Bright red pants and a faltering smile, and a large mug of hot chocolate heaped high with whipped cream, and ice skates and a hopeful smile. A church organ and a Prius and the number 206.

His map becomes a palace, a stately home in which he houses important dates in sunny rooms, and only unlocks on special occasions. Some doors he loses the keys to, and some he keeps and unlocks to sweep away the cobwebs because the memories hurt but the emotions are necessary. His mom is in one of those rooms, the drape of her hair and the music of her laughter, and her hands on his skin when she’d hug him or put a bandaid on his hurts. The smell of her perfume is a room of its own.

Sometimes, when they’re alone, Blaine asks him where he goes and Kurt smiles and says nowhere. He’s right here. Blaine strokes gentle fingers across the ridges of his eyebrows, and through the soft fall of his hair, and kisses his jaw tenderly. He doesn’t speak again, but Kurt knows he knows about the map and the palace and the rooms that he gets lost in. Of all the doors Kurt doesn’t ever open, the ones with the heaviest locks are Blaine’s, housing memories that are best left undisturbed. They have so many better rooms, with higher ceilings and brighter lights. There’s no need to disturb the cobwebs of time by looking backwards.

Sometimes, Kurt wishes he were better at speaking, that he could write down the things he thinks about, or verbalise them in a way anyone would understand. And then he thinks, it doesn’t matter so much, because it seems like Blaine reads him effortlessly, now that he has time to learn the language of Kurt’s face and body. He might not have access to the individual rooms, but he’s the key to most of them, and that’s more than enough.

Text


End file.
